MURDER TECH
by Neel Shah in Mumbai
THE rumours range from people stealing kids for tantric human sacrifice rituals to sneaky trafficking agents abducting young boys and girls from the countryside to ship them off to towns and cities to slave in factories or as dom estic helps or , in worst-case scenarios , to be sold to brothels . Other versions touch on more conventional insecurities : a childless couple on the prowl to snatch children , preferably toddlers , to raise as their own or those who only have daughters and are now ‘ hunting ’ for a son .
The messages travel at the speed of light through neighbourhoods as WhatsApp forwards and Facebook posts uniting masses of people on the basis of common fears . Much like an outbreak , the viral ‘ child-abductor ’ posts have already claimed the lives of more than twenty innocent victims at the hands of feverishly hysterical mobs .
The latest news of lynchings has come out of Maharashtra . Five men from a nomadic community in Maharashtra ’ s Dhule district landed in a village market on July 1 , but didn ’ t return home . They were confronted when one of them tried to make conversation with a young girl . Rumours were already circulating on WhatsApp about a gang of child abductors roaming in the village .
The conclusion about these five ‘ outsiders ’ being ‘ child lifters ’ was arrived at in a reductive , almost algorithmically inhuman manner . The villagers caught and locked the men in a panchayat house and beat them to death with sticks and iron rods . The attack in Rainpada village happened in front of unarmed policemen , who were clearly outnumbered and overwhelmed by the mob .
A day later , the police managed to prevent another mob of around 2,000 people from taking the lives of five labourers in Malegaon . “ Both cases in Maharashtra were due to rumours on social media platforms such as WhatsApp , Facebook and Twitter ,” Malegaon additional superintendent of police Harssh A . Poddar said .
These two cases happened after a fatal assault on two tribal men by a mob of around 400 people in Aurangabad district ’ s Chandgaon village on June 8 . Buried under the widespread condemnation over the Aurangabad lynching were occa-
Messenger That Kills
Rumours gone viral expose a deeply diseased side of society — fearful , xenophobic , murderous
sional WhatsApp posts of praise for the vigilantes for teaching suspected child snatchers a lesson .
Statistically speaking , child safety is a very real issue . Human trafficking is a huge problem the government is grappling with . According to the National Crime Records Bureau ( NCRB ), there were 8,132 human trafficking cases in 2016 against 6,877 the previous year , with the highest number of cases reported in West Bengal , followed by Rajasthan . The data showed more than 60 per cent of the victims rescued were children .
But , like melodrama , this wave of rumours draws more from lore and myth , making any ‘ stranger ’ a suspicious person . As a result , public spaces are becoming hostile like never before .
A 45-year-old woman was lynched to death in Ahmedabad on June 26 by a mob after she was ‘ suspected ’ of being a child
BLOOD EARTH Family of the men lynched in Dhule district being led away from the crime scene
abductor . Another woman , who was attending a family function in Surat , was beaten by a mob when she stepped out to buy balloons for her three-year-old daughter on similar suspicions . Just a month ago , a 60-year-old woman was lynched for giving “ foreign chocolates ” to children in Tamil Nadu ’ s Tiruvannamalai district . In June again , a man hired by the Tripura government to spread awareness about fake news on child abductors was lynched by tribal villagers in a remote hamlet of the state who thought he was the wolf in sheep skin instead . “ Social media is like a matchstick to the already blind crowd . Its advent has caused a strong disconnect in hum an-tohuman interaction , which results in people blindly trusting rumours and the brain taking actions tuned to a stubborn mindset . This happened in the Stone Age , when disconnected humans attacked any
12 OUTLOOK 16 July 2018